Monday, September 11, 2006

Do Drugs Really Rot the Mind?

Although it was fun finding out, in Judith and Dennis Bradin's Jane Addams: Champion of Democracy (Clarion, November) that Jane experimented with opium in college, perhaps more pertinent to this anniversary day is their inclusion of an excerpt of an article Jane Addams wrote for Ladies' Home Journal in 1913, imagining that men rather than women were agitating for suffrage:

You are so fond of fighting--you always have been since you were little boys. [If you were allowed to vote] you'd very likely forget that the real object of the State is to nurture and protect life, and you would be voting away huge sums of money for battleships, each costing ten million dollars, more money than all the buildings of Harvard University. Every time a gun is fired in a battleship, it expends, or rather explodes, seventeen hundred dollars, as much as a college education costs, and yet you would be firing off these guns as mere salutes, with no enemy within three thousand miles, simply because you enjoy the sound of shooting.

4 comments:

WHY oh why are we now in the 21st century with no woman president ever in the history of this country? What IS it about us as a country that makes us so backwards still?

I suspect that many shooters of whatever sex don't only just enjoy the sound of shooting, they enjoy the carnage it causes afterwards as much or more. They can't win in their minds, you see. Without the carnage. Horrible but too often true.

This is painful for me to think about for long; I can't cope with much war news footage on TV at all. When you've actually heard bombs falling near to your own back yard as I did as a very young teen...it rather permanently changes your perspective about "the fun" and the "expediency" of shooting the world up.

Would a U.S. woman president necessarily be anti-militarist? Remember Margaret Thatcher and the Falkland Islands? (Unfortunately Raymond Briggs's anti-Falklands-Island-War picture-book screed, "The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman", is out of print: I used to love shocking customers by flipping to the page where Maggie Thatcher shoots bullets from her nipples).

Well, sigh, I hate to sound a stuffy old lady, but, tcha, tcha, I'm a little dstressed at the lack of historical knowledge displayed sometimes around here, and I didn't say women prime ministers or queens, I said a woman President, and I meant a woman President of the U.S.A. in particlar.

I'm longing to see our first First Gentleman in his proper place in the White House for one thing (straight of a Bingo Brown book, BTW). I mean we've had First Cats and First Dogs, so why are we so slow about getting a First Gentleman?

As far as women leaders are concerned, Britain is hundreds of years ahead of us...with several excellent ruling queens in her past (and a few whapdoozies as well) but that's what I mean about our USA culture. Here we are in the 21st century, and we're still not out of the dark ages as far as allowing women to run high-level public offices....

About Me

I've been the editor in chief of The Horn Book, Inc, since 1996; previously editor of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books and a children's and young adult librarian. Received my M.A. in library science from the University of Chicago in 1982 and a B.A. from Pitzer College in 1978.